Last Updated on October 11, 2022 by growinghome.la
Try *this* creative activity to kick start your home buying process
Do you feel unmotivated or uncertain about the home buying process? Do you want to feel excited and energized to find and buy your dream home? I’ll show you how I used this creative strategy to help start my own home buying process, finding and closing on our home within 6 months.
How An Old Hobby Became a Crucial Step in Our Home Buying Journey
Best-selling author and goal setting expert Michael Hyatt says, “if you have a clear vision, you will eventually attract the right strategy. If you don’t have a clear vision, no strategy will save you.” Being clear about what we want always gives us a better chance of getting there. If we don’t know where we want to go, how will we know how to get there?
As a young adult, I always loved creating collages. I remember sitting in my childhood bedroom for hours, pouring through old magazines and cutting out interesting quotes, images and letters to create everything from personalized binder covers to keepsake boxes. However, I never realized that I was creating a form of vision boards. A vision board is really just a collage with a mission.
Like many homeowners I know, my husband Kyle and I dreamed of owning a home long before we were a position to buy one. However, at the end of 2019, as our wedding got closer, I turned to my old love of collages to help manifest my vision for our new home. I didn’t realize at the time how powerful this exercise would turn out to be.
Learn More About How To Create Your Dream Home Vision
Step 1: Define Your Vision
I highly recommend using my Map Out Your Dream Home Workbook to get clear about the kind of home you’re looking for and your financial goals for your home. I walk you through 4 easy steps to creating a solid plan for your home search, so you feel confident about your personal definition of a dream home. Hint, one of the steps is a vision board, so if you do this step first, you’re already 25% done!
Step 2: Gather Inspiring Images That Support Your Home Buying Vision
You can do this two ways – either using magazines, newspapers or printed photos that represent your vision or by creating a virtual vision board.
It was a lot of fun doing the old school magazine route when creating my own vision board. Luckily, I had a stack of home design magazines lying around and decided to go through them. I pulled out images that caught my eye. Anything I liked, I cut out. This included words that reflected the feeling or the description of the home I wanted. However, I mostly focused on home features, design elements and inspiring phrases that described how I wanted to feel in my home.
Pro-tip: if you want to fill the board and not have any white space, make sure you cut out “filler” pages too that can serve as background pieces but that you don’t care about (mostly) covering up. See my vision board under Step 3 as an example.
If you decide you’d rather do this virtually, I like to use Canva, or even Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. You can easily copy and paste images into these programs and crop or move them around as needed.
Step 3: Get Creative With Your Vision of Your Home!
Have fun with this part! Enjoy the creative process of reviewing the images you’ve found and arranging them in a way that looks best to you. Use a sturdy backing like cardboard, or a poster or even foam board if you’re fancy.
There are no right or wrong answers here for how it should look or how big it should be. For my dream home vision board, I had so many images I liked that I made two! You can see photos of them below.
Feel free to keep experimenting until you get the look you want. For physical vision boards, I recommend a good old-fashioned glue stick to paste the images in place. This is still the easiest way to make sure you’re securing all of the images exactly where you want them.
Step 4: Review Your Home Vision Regularly
This is an often-overlooked step. Once you’ve created your vision, make sure you put it in a place where you’ll see it. You may want to take a few minutes each day to look at it, reflecting on the feeling it brings you. If you review your vision regularly, you’ll be able to tap into the inspiration that it sparks for you and it will stay top of mind.
The power of creating a vision board for your goals is a visual representation of a key component to successful goal achievement – the act of writing them down. Dr. Gail Matthews, a psychology professor at Dominican University in California, did a study on goal setting with 267 participants. Specifically, results show that you are 42 percent more likely to achieve your goals just by writing it down. Other key factors in goal achievement include accountability and public commitment.
I loved the process of creating my vision board, but I knew it wasn’t enough to just complete this project. It was fun to create a ritual around reviewing my vision board every morning for a few minutes. I’d think about what I had created and how it made me feel. I also thought about any next steps, no matter how small, I could identify for moving closer towards this vision. Lastly, I shared my vision with my husband Kyle. This helped me complete the public commitment piece of successful goal setting. I hope this exercise helps you with your vision, allowing you figure out your strategy for your future home. For more tips on buying your first home, check out my first Ask An Expert Series post here.
I’d love to see your finished vision board! Please share it on Instagram and tag me @growinghome.la or email me a picture of it at lindsay@growinghomela.com.
If you want to complete key next steps in your home buying process, get your free copy of my Map Out Your Dream Home Workbook to clarify your goals for your home. This four-step guide will help energize you and allow you to create your own personalized plan for your home search, giving you actionable tips along the way.